Hawker centers are an integral part of Singaporean culture and are currently managed by the National Environment Agency (NEA) of Singapore. At present there are over 107 hawker centers situated around our island.

 

In the hawker centers that are government owned and run, there are both subsidized and unsubsidized stalls.

 

Firstly, subsidized stalls were offered around 1970 and rental rates are currently kept at minimum.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: http://www.nea.gov.sg/docs/default-source/public-health/rental-policy-for-stalls-in-hawker-centres-and-wet-markets.pdf?sfvrsn=2

 

Secondly, there are also unsubsidized stalls that fall into three categories.

 

The first category involves tendered rent stalls that have a lease period of 3 years. NEA puts vacant stalls for tender each month between the 13th to the 26th (NEA, n.d.). With effect from 1st April 2012, subletting of stalls was no longer allowed. However, for existing subsided stall holders, they are still allowed to let out their stalls but no further subletting is allowed.  The second category involves subsidized stall holders subletting their stalls out to others as they wish to exit the trade. According to Tan (2015), “The assignee’s rent would be progressively raised every year from subsidised rent to assessed market rent over the three-year term tenancy” (p.6). Lastly, NEA also sells stalls to owners for a 20 year period and currently the leases are set to expire between 2014 and 2017.

 

Aside from being government owned, there is a new business model with companies such as Fei Siong taking over to run hawker centers on a not for profit basis with prices being kept low and affordable for consumers (Tan, 2015).

 

We have conducted a scanning of related media reports on the hawker scene and identified some key issues that have stood out.

 

Rising rents are of concern due to the fact that subsidized rentals are no longer going to be available to the new generation of hawkers. In addition, there is a severe lack of continuity as many young Singaporeans do not wish to go into the business. Despite schemes such as the Hawker Master Trainer launched by the Workforce Development Agency (WDA) in 2013  that are meant to encourage the younger generation to learn from veteran hawkers, the uptake of the program has not seen much success. By the end of April 2014, only 13 people have wanted to take it up (Chua, 2014) and out of the first batch, only 5 have struck out to set up their own stalls. It seems a pressing problem as hawker culture is considered something unique to Singapore. The rest of our project will focus on gathering the views on the ground to see what the hawkers themselves have to say about the trade.

 

References

 

NEA (n.d). Managing Hawker Centres and Markets In Singapore Retrieved from http://www.nea.gov.sg/public-health/hawker-centres

 

Chua, G. (2014, April 28). First batch of graduates from Hawker Master Trainer programme show off skills. The Straits Times. Retrieved October 18, 2015.

 

Tan, C. B. (2015). Keeping Char Kway Teow Cheap—At What Price? [PDF document] Retrieved from http://lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Hawker-centre-case-study.pdf